Insight Myanmar

“We are already in the danger. So we don’t care anymore. The dawn won’t be that much darker than the midnight. And we are already in the midnight, so the darkness can’t be much worse. We are at the peak of the darkness.” These were the words of Inda Aung Soe as military tanks were rolling past at the start of our free-flowing and open interview, when asked if he felt safe talking to us from the ch...

“The Dhamma is so central to this culture, and [yet] not understood by the people who write about this place in the media from overseas. So all those sorts of things get reported from a vacuum of understanding about how incredibly important it is, for this whole culture.” So says Daw Viranani, an American Buddhist nun based in Chan Myay Myaing Monastery in northern Yangon. We were able to talk wit...

Antonio Costanzo and his team may never solve all the mysteries of the life of the great Italian monk U Lokanatha, but they are certainly trying! Even the little we know of U Lokanatha’s spiritual resume puts him in rarefied air. A forerunner of the Buddhist modernist movement, he took up a meditation practice before it was commonplace and was one of the first to talk extensively about the connect...

“And then there was a particular moment in the meditation where it was almost as if awareness separated out from the rest of the objects of consciousness.” So begins David Sudar on sharing about one of his most powerful meditation experiences, which occurred during one sitting at Shwe Oo Min Monastery in Yangon. David describes how in this transformational moment, he was able to maintain a clear a...

Today’s episode explores a journey from the fashion runway to the meditation hall. An actress, model, and beauty queen, Luissa Burton discusses the circuitous route that ultimately brought her to meditation practice in Myanmar. Luissa’s career trajectory did not follow the conventional narrative of the fashion industry. From childhood, she was stricken with two serious skin conditions, eczema and...

What place does engagement in social justice issues have, if any, within vipassana meditation centers in the tradition of S.N. Goenka? That is question Clyde Ford is asking, and is at the heart of a training session he led for teachers and students at Dhamma Kunja, a vipassana center in Washington state. In addition to being a corporate trainer on racial justice, Clyde is himself a dedicated vipas...

This is the second episode in our series exploring Filipino meditators affected by the Dhamma of the Golden Land. Here, we tell the story of just one Filipino meditator: Raymond Riveria , or Mon for short. Mon was attracted to martial arts, but being raised Catholic, he was initially skeptical of Asian forms of religious practice. His first formal practice came in the form of Christian meditation,...

Myanmar is the dream destination for so many meditators and spiritual seekers, and this was certainly the case for Sebastien Le Normand . A published author and French yogi in the tradition of S.N. Goenka living in Canada, Sebastien long wished to visit sites related to this lineage of teachers, and he made his dream a reality by planning a personal pilgrimage in 2016. He was so moved by the exper...

The Buddha’s teachings of liberation were not meant only for prosperous and stable times, but also for when things are uncertain, or even perilous. Perhaps no moment in recent years has tested the mission of contemporary meditation centers and monasteries as much as this ongoing coronavirus pandemic, when just the basic act of gathering together poses a serious health risk. In this episode, we che...

If you reference the Philippines, vipassana meditation practice and Buddhist study are not the first things that come to mind! That is because this heavily Catholic island nation is pretty much the only region in all of Southeast Asia that has had hardly any connection to the Dhamma over the course of the last 2,500 years. So then, why would a podcast based on Buddhist practice, with a specific fo...

Alan Clements’ new book, Burma: Voices of Freedom, is a monumental achievement, a work more than three decades in the making. Alan interviewed hundreds of people in order to examine the intersecting lines between Burmese Buddhist practice and the turbulent history of the country, thus bringing together the worldly and the spiritual in profound ways.  He decided to sit for just one full-length...

“Having already witnessed first-hand the transformation of mindfulness from mysterious curiosity to commercialized buzzword, going back to read about a time when so much was still so unexplored generated a kind of nostalgia in me. Perhaps this is like when Americans pine for the ‘simplicity’ of the 1950s or the ‘freedom’ of the Old West—it says more about the psychology of the one doing the pining...

The second in a two-part interview, educator and amateur historian Zaw Win Htet continues his stories that weave together his own life, his local region, and some of the most revered Dhamma teachers of 20 th century Burma. In this segment, he covers the life and monastery of Mohnyin Sayadaw, the most important monastic disciple of Ledi Sayadaw. He also relays the ancient history of the monkey-run...

“My grandmother is the main character of this story,” Zaw Win Htet informs us as he begins the interview. An educator and amateur historian, Zaw shares how the bedtime stories she told him every night animated his life’s journey of discovery. Combining academic study with oral history, lived experience and a family lore steeped in deep Buddhist faith, Zaw weaves together his own life, his local re...

This is the third in our ongoing “Intersections of Dhamma and Race” podcast series. At this time of increased tensions, there is a sore need for personal reflection and introspection, deep and active listening of “the other”, and communication across all boundaries and communities. And when we do this based firmly on the bedrock of the Buddha’s timeliness teachings of liberation, the possibility o...

The story of Melissa Coats is a tale of finding balances. It relates to navigating her identity, being half-white and half-Korean, and her practice, going back and forth between being a lay practitioner and Buddhist nun, in both secular and religious communities. It speaks to her life, alternating between progressive enclaves in California and a more conservative Burmese Buddhist life in Myan...

The sixth episode in our “COVID-19 in Myanmar” series, this is the first show in this series in which all the voices are from a single place —in this case, Thabarwa Monastery in Than Lyin. This episode departs from previous ones in more ways than this, however. As some of the interviews were collected right as the world began to shut down because of COVID-19, we realized that while not that long a...

Sometimes a single moment can be so profound… or so complex… that it takes hours, or even days, following the encounter to get a handle on it. In the story that follows, that “moment” has been taking years to process. In this case, the actual moment in question is simple enough: Yonie, an African-American vipassana meditator in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, travels to Myanmar to pay homage to the...

This is a very different kind of show than any previous episode we’ve brought you on the Insight Myanmar Podcast . Regular listeners may remember that a few months ago, we interrupted our usual run of sit-down interviews to produce a special series on the coronavirus pandemic in Myanmar. In these episodes, we checked in with a number of monastics and practitioners, and inquired how they as meditat...

Welcome to the fifth episode in our ongoing “COVID-19 in Myanmar” series, called “Sheltering in Place.” While the previous show told the stories of four expats who left just before the world closed down, the current episode relates the tales of four more expats who were in Myanmar at the time that the pandemic hit, and made the decision to remain in the country and ride out the storm in the Golden...

How has the coronavirus pandemic impacted foreign meditators in Myanmar? This is precisely the question we set out to answer in this “Expats in Exile Edition” of our COVID-19 in Myanmar series. The guests include: ·      Jose Molina , an agricultural economist based in Yangon, who observed that life stayed pretty much as usual in the city, even as the rest of the world shu...

In 2017, Zach Hessler, then known as U Obhasa, was a forest monk in upper Myanmar. Following in the tradition of monks during the Buddha's time, one day he set out from his forest monastery on foot to wander among the mountains and villages in the vicinity. He did so with the intention of following a set of ascetic practices known as dhutaṅga. But he could not have imagined what would happen next....

How is the coronavirus pandemic impacting monastics in Myanmar? This is precisely the question we set out to answer in this very special “Monastic Edition” of our COVID-19 in Myanmar series. The guests include: ·      U Viveka , a Canadian monk studying under Sayadaw U Tejaniya, who is using the pandemic as an opportunity to examine his fear of death. ·   &n...

In the second installment of our ongoing COVID-19 in Myanmar series, we present the Women’s Edition . So often at times of crisis and at key moments in world events, it is the voices of men who make the news. This is certainly no less true in Myanmar, where speeches from revered Sayadaws and male meditation teachers dominate the Dhamma discourse. For this reason, this episode will highlight those...

In this inaugural episode of our ongoing "COVID-19 in Myanmar" series, we present the Burmese Edition , where we hear from the four local voices who present their perspectives on the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in Myanmar. They reflect on how their Buddhist faith and practice has played a role in helping to them to understand and respond to the crisis. The guests include: ·   &nbsp...